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You smiled at me for a moment as I left
For I saw your tears, scars and fears
I nearly guessed it was courtesy But your bright eyes revealed the rest and I understood I pray you know I understood why we left it like that and always will anger and simple desire to be held tenderly by a father who’d listen genuinely who’d care enough to let you be his daughter and nothing more And I was sad that I could never tell you I understood what I saw in your sparkling eyes But I still wanted to show you Elsie
And I wanted to take you to visit Kay
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I wanted so to reminisce
But I won’t -
not about other lifetimes when we might have shared lust or rich and tender lovemaking but about all might have been loves and arguments the places we might have lived and patience spent learning how to live with a lover the jokes we might have played on each other children we might have set free our own growing old hours silently spent holding tired hands a pent-up flood of memories that might have been - all reflected in your sparkling eyes as I turned to leave except perhaps this way This way of words woven as medicine you call poetry Is it poetry because Yevtushenko might never call his Colours medicine even seeing your dawning heart expand and then run away from its sunset warmth? Then it is what it is - but forgive me that your touch on all those that come here to smoke share their medicine and pain and jokes is like all the clan mothers I’ve known whose gentle power taught me how to recognize sparkling eyes like yours. Which is why I cannot show you what I see,
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with their hidden scars,
as they walk from their cars up to your porch yearning for the medicine only you can give. I can only say I saw these things in your sparkling eyes when you smiled And I heard their soft words shared memory and simple request: ’Please, no. This lifetime will be my time and not ours. Please understand. Though there may be another man who might never be like you might have been to me that other lifetime long ago, this lifetime is my time to do the work I came here to do. And this is why
But if, when you pass into your
May 1, 1998
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She was sterile
all he could allow his own
Blackfoot half-breed long way from home lost the pleasure of touch and ability to conceive in a rape at the hands of a white stepfather years before. When the stranger saw her in the strip joint half-breed Mohawk eyes to see were her eyes, stone grey rooted deeper than the past she carried like a stone in her womb. But she could still laugh and smile
For years of hours
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They dodged for centuries of
minutes
to and fro - the dance of fear passed down from great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers when the cavalry rode into a village Until the lies of years grew
What medicine wrings water from stone
For passion is not just barbed wire
become dust, not only reservation sins |
washed away, nor broken treaties
melting
in warm liquids of life mingling like tears of mourning and joy - Passion is medicine for two lost warriors meeting on appropriated land Indian flesh held in Indian hands with a love lent from seven generations of spirits mourning on the other side of death. They wept, then softly slept like children
So when he returned in the spring
June, 1998
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You would ask
Would you only hear
what kind of man I would be to you and would I love you the way you've always wanted a man to love? Would I be the one that would stay that would last that wouldn't leave you but instead fulfill you? You would ask this if you could if you could fast forward through obligatory small talk your nervous smiles while wondering, 'Am I coming on too strong or too shy or unsure or immature or too strong or too weak or pretentiously deep or perhaps just not myself?' Fast forward past learning that not all Indians are drunks not all urban Indians have sold their traditions and mixed bloods aren't just plain lost, fast forward until my eyes hit stop on your remote control and what would I say to you? what you want to hear? That if I embrace your heart's face I could only offer all my passion when we made love, no fear of freely revealing infant confusion needing to be mothered by your breast nor turn away from your own need to be held? |
Or would you also
Would you see me holding
allow yourself to hear my sincere plea how to discern need from want? why do we need? why me? Would you only choose to hear my assent to grow old with you, to know there will be someone to care or care for when no one else comes or cares to visit? Or will you also strain to see the countless hours or days through the years I'll set apart from you wallowing in fear or regret at harsh words said my pride that would deny your caress or smile before the pain of apart unbearable compels me to look at you and admit I'm wrong in the child's exquisite moment of please hold me? our child in my arms tears of wonder freely flowing at the miracle you wrought over months of wrenching nausea, sleeplessness, and my struggle to comprehend the incomprehensible red of afterbirth - but not choose to see my clear eye loosing bowstring on still buck omit my knife cutting deer flesh quick and deep pouring cool water in cupped bloody hand |
over still, warm, lifeless muzzle,
No matter, beautiful woman,
my tears bottled with all those collecting unfallen unseen in hunter's heart and throat never accounted until my own moment of harvest? for strangers we remain as if ordained by fate (that fiction imagination weaves to constrain impulsive hearts, as it should be when we have only one heart one life to give in a world of possibilities) It affords nothing but pain
Leave perhaps to faith
July 1998
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In Acteal back
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Very few in Acteal spoke Spanish For these refugees were Tzotzil Indians speaking a language handed down for centuries in that mountainous land of the Maya So her mother didn't understand the orders barked by soldiers outside the Catholic church where she and the villagers had hidden No that it would've mattered Her mother's heavy burden soon to be spattered on cool ochre-colored earth would have slowed her escape from that presumed sacred place And so the little one
But pity not she nor any other Tzotzil
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to the incomparably efficient
Catholic empire, and would that President Zedillo, John Paul's Board of Directors and the Wall Street Oligarchy could watch those bayonets being cleaned every morning outside their rectories as they rise) No, pity not those forty five
No reserve pity for all those who
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they bought to silence
their consciences roar Pity them, instead, for they deserve it and yet, certainly no more For look closely now at Acteal's forty-five
How blind of the rich not to see
No, I fear only nature herself
June, 1998
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| I wandered out onto your old flat world
with little left of my wonder trailing a digital pall the tattered remains of my failed campaign and the fall of logic and strained my thought to find what was lost in Copernicus mind and all in vain. Until at last my muse in a fit of pity
And then my muse
For then she growled!
And washed her way into
But now those denizens
But now those denizens
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grew into a mighty host
rising up in front of me great ghosts of anicent stone rising upward, stretching, yawning casting their rough-hewn shadows across one city block, then another and then another and all the while chanting deep the epic recitation of a more mythic than geologic creation Long dead before
I turned and humbly begged them
“Long before
It’s singing in the spaces
At last my eyes lifted
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at basement bargains amidst
the wholesale rape of our morally bankrupt nation (financing arms for generals marching, no tiptoeing across the stench, no wait that’s my cousin piled across the sidewalk steam vent). I now saw time cooling
I saw time washing away
I even saw time wash away
Time whipping past me now
One only need look in a mirror to see
Anthony J. Rice
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Near where the charter'd Thames does flow And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man,
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
1794 - William Blake from Songs of Experience |
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over my crumpled life, at first the I understood only the poverty of what I have. But then its particular light on woods, on rivers, on the sea became my beginning in the uncolored world in which I had not yet had my beginning. I am so frightened, I am so frightened, of the unexpected sunrise, of discoveries, tears, and the excitement finishing, I do not fight it. My love is this fear I nourish it, who can nourish nothing, love's slipshod watchman. fear hems me in I know these moments are short, and the colors in my eyes will vanish when your face sets Yevegeny Yevtushenko - b. 1933 |
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| No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece
of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor
of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because
I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the
bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
-- John Donne, 1624. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, No. 17 |
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| I want to sleep the dream of the apples,
to withdraw from the tumult of cemetries, I want to sleep the dream of that child who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas. I don't want to hear again that the dead do not lose their blood,
I want to sleep awhile,
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Cover me at dawn with a veil.
because dawn will throw fistfuls of ants at me. and wet with hard water my shoes so that the pincers of the scorpion slide. For i want to sleep the dream of the apples,
by Federico Garcia Lorca Translated by Stephen Spencer & J L Gili
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Were laid out in order upon the sidewalk, In their white starched dresses, In their pitiful white dresses. On their foreheads and breasts
Do not weep for them, madre.
[Monday April 26, 1937 4:30 PM ] by Norman Rosten |